Marc Güell

I am a postdocoral fellow working in Dr. Church's lab at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. My current research is centered in creating new biological functions using in vivo directed evolution, and in biological technology development.

I was trained as an Organic Chemist and as a Technical Engineer in Telecommunications. As undergraduate, I participated in several research projects. In 2003, I did an internship as Analytical Chemist in a water treatment company in London. In 2005, I worked as Organic Chemist in the Spanish Research Council carrying out solid phase synthesis. After that, I did my first steps in Biotechnology. I spent 9 month as undergraduate in the biochemistry lab at IQS, where I developed an assay for anti-cancer drug screening and I expressed recombinant proteins. After graduation, my interest for integration of experimental and in silico approaches brought me to a PhD in Systems Biology.

I started my PhD research at EMBL, but after the first year, I moved to the Centre for Genomic Regulation together with my group, where we continued our research in M. pneumoniae. My PhD research was centered in the use of high throughput technologies such as tiling arrays and next generation sequencing to characterize M. pneumoniae's transcriptome. We focused our efforts in understanding operon structure/dynamics and antisense transcription (Güell et al.). We also developed a protocol for strand-specific transcriptome mapping using Next Generation Sequencing (Vivancos et al.). I intensively participated in parallel projects related to Systems Biology and Mycoplasma pneumoniae (A deep look into metabolism, Yus et al.; Protein complexes, Kühner et al.). In my postdoctoral research in Luis Serrano's lab, I mainly worked in two areas. On one hand, we integrated transcriptomics with quantitative proteomics data in M. pneumoniae. On the other hand, we used next generation data to study transcription initiation in different prokaryotic organisms.